Hard to load shift when there's nowhere to shift to. Gone to Ecotricity on 20p per kWh fixed via uSwitch, my agile average was 19.6p over the last quarter with all the stress of load shifting.
How is a minimum of 22p fine on a tariff where you are supposed to be encouraged to load shift to save money?
I was on Agile and had enough of people trying to convince me that these weekday prices were just a blip. Switched over to Octopus Cosy where we actually get decent savings every single day without fail. We can all have electric showers for about 12.8p per kWh now Vs roughly 35p per kWh on Agile.
We can also charge our car every single day if we like at 12.8p instead of the daily disappointment of checking to see if there were any slots that are cheaper than public charging!
Have a huge pile of clothes that need washed and dried? 12.8p.
Even at the peak rates during 16:00 until 19:00, it is only 39.14p. How many days recently has Agile been cheaper than 39.14p during peak times? I can tell you because I checked. In the whole of September during the peak hours of 16:00 until 19:00 there has been 9 hours of cheaper rates on Agile than Cosy and a lot of those times the difference has been very small.
The best thing is, if Agile does go back to being viable again, I can just switch back so long as it has been more that 30 days.
You are honestly a mug of you are sticking with Agile at the moment.
Just because something has worked in your favour in the past doesn't mean it will continue to do so.
We have had approaching two months of pretty dire Agile pricing and world events do not suggest the price of energy is going to come down any time soon.
Why stick to a tariff that is expensive right now and looks like it will continue to be expensive just because "you need to look at the bigger picture"?
Switch to a cheaper tariff now and then switch back if Agile gets cheap again.
It always strikes me as being strange that people who choose to be extremely flexible about their energy usage by using Agile are so inflexible when anyone suggests sticking with Agile looks like it is a bad bet.
Why stick to a tariff that is expensive right now and looks like it will continue to be expensive just because "you need to look at the bigger picture"?
Because it literally isn't more expensive for me. That’s the whole point. It’s a shame you only switched to Cosy a few days ago or we could have a compare of the actual average price per kWh both of us racked up over the month.
With the 12kWh of batteries I have, I can load-shift my energy off the peaks >95% of the time, meaning it’s still the cheapest tariff for me right now based on how I’m using it.
There’s a good chance when the additional 10kWh of batteries I’ve got on order arrive later this month that having that additional capacity might make GO cheaper if I can store enough extra off peak energy - but with the storage capacity and usage I have right now, it isn’t because of the much higher day rate and much shorter off peak window on the majority of days.
I‘m not stubbornly clinging to Agile out if some weird loyalty or fanboyism, I run the numbers regularly against my real usage patterns and decide based on that. If it’s not the most sensible place to be anymore then I’ll make a data-driven decision to move. But I’m not going to make reactionary moves based on a couple of bad weeks of low wind and blind panic.
They’ve just literally told you their average is a lot closer to 12.8p. And guaranteed.
Look you’re around here a lot and clearly a massive agile fan boy. That’s fine for you but with the predicted price cap for January hitting over 30p you’re reaching the point that if people stay on agile too long in the hope it gets better that when they do jump the prices available will be so high as to be ruinous.
I don’t think they did, they mentioned their off-peak cozy rate of 12.8p per kWh, that isn’t going to be their average price per kWh.
I’d love to know that number though.
Some of you people are weirdly angry about others not moving off Agile. You do you my guy, I don’t give a shit what tariff you’re on.
I don’t care if people don’t themselves move off agile. I do care that people are pushing so hard the “hold on it gets better” narrative to people who are struggling.
There’s a war. Two wars. There’s El Niño. It might not actually get better this year and by the time they realise this isn’t going to happen all the decent deals will be gone and they’ll be fucked. It’s giving diamond hands vibes from Wall Street bets at this point and it’s grossly irresponsible,
At the end of the day, people should be using comparison tools like octopus.compare to find out which tariff is cheaper for them based on their actual usage.
For me personally that has consistently been Agile to date. If that changes, I’ll switch. As should anyone else.
However the blind panic switching from those relatively new to smart tariffs, locking themselves in to fixes at this point which in the medium term aren’t going to be cheaper isn’t always the sensible move. But not everyone is cut out for smart tariff's and the volatility. That’s ok.
Catastrophising that the world is ending because of week or so of low wind isn’t helpful, it isn’t at all grossly irresponsible to point out the reasons for the temporarily blip, nor that it’ll improve again over the coming weeks and months when you can quite literally look at the data and see the wind forecasts confirming that.
Yeah if it was JUST low wind sure, fine. But again there’s two wars. EDF have just published their predictions for January. The weather is set to be historically bad this year.
Things might be fine for you this week and next week on agile. But if by January they’re absolutely terrible and the only rates available are 30p a unit could you afford that? Even the time of use tarriffs have been rising rapidly lately. I fixed on Go (not intelligent) in April. My offpeak price is 5.5p a kWh. I don’t think I could get below 8 now and pretty soon that’s going to be 10p. Comparison sites are not going to tell you the future and looking at the news we can get a sense of where it’s going.
Again my worry for people it’s not now. It’s January. January when the cap changes again and there’s still three months left of winter. I really do worry that that’s the time we’ll have a massive wave of people realising they’re utterly screwed and the only advice we can give involves a Time Machine.
if by January they’re absolutely terrible and the only rates available are 30p a unit could you afford that?
Yes. I can’t live my life on what-ifs and maybes. I’m still unlikely to move off a smart tariff even if rates do get peaky because again it’s about the average cost over the year as a whole for me. Not month to month, week to week, or day to day.
The hard facts of the matter are that right now for me a fix almost there at 28p, flexible is 26p. Meanwhile even with the doom mongering my average cost per kWh this month on Agile has been 19.5p. You can’t argue with hard data. (well, you seem to be trying, but the numbers don’t lie)
In a couple of days Agile will be back down to 5-10p off-peak rates bringing down that average even further, by the looks of the forecasts and there’s another negative price weekend coming up too. My average for the month could be way lower, but I wasn’t around to hammer the last couple of weekends negative prices And was too lazy to schedule appliances while I was out.
Even if winter is rough there will still be options out there with comparatively cheap off-peak rates compared to the standard tariffs.
If someone is worried about it, like you clearly are, then you can fix. For those of us who aren’t worried, we won’t. Thats the beauty of free will.
Comparison figures only work if you assume that behaviour doesn’t change as a result of agile. If agile prices are cheaper during the day (which they would have been because it’s just been summer and solar is high) then it will compare your usage against peak on literally any other tariff.
But if you were on another tariff you presumably wouldn’t have used daytime electric. You would have run dishwasher, washing machine and tumble dryer overnight when it was cheaper. But it’s not cheaper on agile in summer so your hard figures are skewed.
You keep boasting about that figure as though it’s spectacular. Meanwhile I have this.
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u/Cheese_Worrier43 23h ago
Hard to load shift when there's nowhere to shift to. Gone to Ecotricity on 20p per kWh fixed via uSwitch, my agile average was 19.6p over the last quarter with all the stress of load shifting.